Sometimes it’s the little things; guitar milestones

Chasplaya
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Mon Jun 20, 2011 3:44 pm

michelew wrote:
Chasplaya wrote:
Jeez do you ever look back and look at your spelling ugh!! atrocious too many red wines tonight thats for sure lol.
Fixed teach! I can't even blame booze. The rest of the red lines are due to that funny American language dictionary that TG uses.

M.
I just downloaded a Firefox dictionary for New Zealand , I noted they had an Australian one also, great spell checker no more Americanisms (it didn't even pick up Americanisms lol)


sbutler
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Mon Jun 20, 2011 7:28 pm

michelew wrote:
sbutler wrote:
You know what they say, "if you love something, set it free. If it was meant to not break, it won't. "

Wait, i think I screwed that up. "If you have a pic, and you want it to break, use it. If you don't want it to break, keep it in the....... Wait, I screwed that up."

"If your a lunie, and you break your favorite pic, you need to" ............... wait, I DON'T WANT TO SCREW UP ANYMORE.


Sorry about your Favorite pic Michele, but you should get excited about all the new songs you'll learn with the next favorite pic that is going to break someday.



Scott
Scott, nice points...well nice attempt at ... points. Now you're just teasing me. You mean my next one will wear out too. You mean I'm destined to have more heartbreak after I've broken the next one in... I don't know if I'm strong enough for that.... How do you handle the sadness???
B)

M.
Just remember Michelle, tough times don't last, but tough people do.

If you want, I'll send you some of my pic's until you get a new favorite. Its not heartbreak if that pic allows you to become better at what your doing.


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neverfoundthetime
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Tue Jun 21, 2011 5:44 am

Shel, Know how to confuse an antipodal?
Line up a row of capos and tell her to take her pick.
Bwuhahahaha!

Man, I'm so sorry to hear about Harold's demise. Maybe you need to go on line, there must be a virtual dating service for picks somewhere.
As for me, using my index finger as a pick sure has its advantages... no pockets cluttered with the wrong pick and no desperate lifting of sofa cushions in search of Harold's friends!

Finally getting the rhythm of Eleanor Rigby was a very significant (if pathetic) milestone for me... only took about 20 years!


Hydroman52
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Tue Jun 21, 2011 1:45 pm

Hey Michele,

There are plenty of picks in the sea. The quicker you wear them out, the more you are practicing. Put the pick in a jar somewhere on a shelf and move on. I don’t hang on to them too long when they start to wear, because, as you said, it affects your playing. And we don’t need to lose ground when it can be so tough to make progress sometimes. So, take the pick out of the equation. Like Dave, I use Dunlop only in the 1.14 mm thickness. Last bag of 72 count came last month and I’m hoping it will last a year.

So, milestones? First memorable one was getting the excuses behind me when I was first starting out. I talked about it in this thread:

Humbling milestone

That was a huge and very important milestone that I was very fortunate to learn early in my guitar playing life. A more recent one was learning to play Neil Young’s Old Man more accurately. This was actually the reason that I got back into playing the guitar after a 20 year-or-so hiatus.

Here is the story for those who have the time . . . . .

A couple of years ago, a girl that I was going out with asked me to go on a weekend camping, kayaking, fishing, campfiring trip on some land that her friends owned on beautiful Lake Michigamme in the northern part of the UP of Michigan. So, one evening, four of us are sitting around the campfire, and a guitar materializes out of nowhere. It gets passed around the fire and everyone gets to noodle a bit. Then the question came (“Do you play?”) with the answer (“In a previous life.”), and the guitar was dropped into my lap. So, I played the simplest song I knew (Helpless – Neil Young) to loosen the rust. The girl I was with even knew some of the lyrics. I played another N. Young song and finally attempted to do Old Man (by the next day, I had earned the moniker Neil Young Boy). The girl I was with said that I played Old Man pretty well, but it wasn’t really the way it was done. I should go back to the album and listen to it again . . . . . . . Hmmmmmmmmm, I started playing it when I was 15 years old, one would think I would know it inside out, and I thought I was playing it so close to the original that it wasn’t even worth mentioning.

When I got back home after the camping trip, I thought a little more about the comment, and I’m embarrassed to say that I was a little put off by it. But it still bothered me and I went to Amazon and ordered a copy of the Harvest album (my previous copy was vinyl and got wrecked from all the play time) so I could give a listen and play along. Holy crap! I was playing it all wrong! After looking through videos on You-Tube, I found a video of a guy that was doing it right (Neil Young), and shamelessly copied him. It only took about an hour or two to do all of this correct.

And that is the story of how I got back into playing the guitar. Very shortly afterward, I found this site.

Hydroman52


michelew
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Location: Sydney, Australia
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Wed Jun 22, 2011 5:42 am

Thanks guys.

Chas - I'll check it out.

Scott - very sweet offer but I'm coolio.

Chris - haha - cute. And rhythm is good.

Hydroman - I found your advice very validating and helpful. Today I went to the music store and got myself three thicknesses of Dunlop pick, 0.88, 1.14 and 1.5. I'll work out which ones I like best and then I'll change it regularly rather than letting them wear down so much. I though I might be making excuses for sloppy playing, so it's good to know that accuracy suffers if you let the point wear too much. Thanks.


Thanks

Michele


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